Nomadland

by Jessica Bruder

  I hadn’t seen another soul. So I drank a lot of water and set out in the car again, seeking signs of human habitation.

  The first clue was horses. One mile southwest of Linda’s plot, three of them stood behind a green-painted gate, watching suspiciously as the car approached, then ambling off. A sign on the gate read “No Trespassing: Violators Will Be Prosecuted.” It was perforated with nine rusty bullet holes and one fresh shotgun blast whose edges hadn’t rusted out yet. A yellow casing from a twenty-gauge shell lay crushed in the dirt nearby.

  A breeze came up, rustling the chaparral and carrying with it another sound, something between a scrape and a creak. It seemed to be coming from a dilapidated A-frame shack that stood a hundred yards to the west. A loose sheet of corrugated tin on the roof seesawed up and down, groaning. For the first time it occurred to me that some folks might not want to be found. Startling people way out here could be a serious mistake. So I approached slowly, calling “Hellloooo!” like a lost tourist. No answer.

  The shack was a collage of plywood, chicken wire and tin. A shredded blue tarp dangled over a hole in the wall. The inside was empty apart from a small bench on the dirt floor. The desert around it was covered in piles of detritus that suggested lives interrupted. There were a couple of teddy bears, a two-handled cooking pot, one high-heeled shoe, clothes hangers, empty cans, ceramic mugs, and a cassette by the group Chicago. I wondered about the owners of the objects and whether they had left this place in a hurry. (Later I would read about the debris that collects in border deserts, much of it left behind by exhausted migrants. In some cases, those entering the country on foot must pare down their possessions before squeezing into the crowded cars that will spirit them away.)

  Resuming the drive, I spotted more evidence of humanity. From a dirt road half a mile north of the shack, I could see a patch with a few flat-topped sheds, a corral made of salvaged pallets, two hoop-style greenhouses—gardens, maybe?—and an ancient sedan with the hood propped open, all behind barbed wire. Circling back east, I found a property I’d missed earlier, this one about two-thirds of a mile southwest of Linda’s land. A donkey in a paddock brayed loudly as I pulled up. There was also a travel trailer, bleached bone white, with a Porta Potty strapped to its side. Again I called out. No answer.

  Satellite maps showed a ranch farther south. Maybe someone was home? Following the map, I passed black cattle lazing under scraggly mesquite trees. Soon a fence appeared and, far beyond that, a house. But the road turned ugly. After a short upward slope, it dipped into a low spot where puddles reflected the sky. I tried skirting the edge. It was soft. Soon the Corolla’s front end was mired up to the wheel wells. Trying to back out just made the tires spin, spattering gobs of mud across the white rental car.

  I remembered Linda’s warning: Don’t get stuck.

  Cell reception was weak from the car, so I waded out and clambered up a berm. After five dropped calls, an AAA agent explained there’s no service on dirt roads. Next try was Nalley’s Pit Stop, a father-and-son towing company. Lonnie, the owner, was out on a job. Could I wait for a call back? Of course. Heavy clouds were massing to the southeast. Hiking to the ranch house suddenly seemed like a good idea. When I got close, the silence broke apart in a cacophony of barking—a canine doorbell. A dozen dogs roamed the grounds, some free and others pacing in pens. The smallest, a black and white pup, trotted after me like a self-appointed ambassador. In the front yard were a welding rig, a weed whacker, and a toilet bowl full of large stones. I walked up to the gate and yelled hello. Nothing.

  The phone rang as I was heading back to the car. Lonnie said he was close. Soon a flatbed tow truck materialized where the cows had been. I climbed up the berm and waved my arms like a castaway.

  Lonnie and his son, Lonnie Jr., had seen the clouds and rushed over. Part of the ranch was on a floodplain. A UPS truck had gotten stuck here once in the rainy season. By the time the driver phoned Lonnie for help, he recalled, water was rushing past the tires. Nothing to do until the land dried out.

  Lonnie Jr. connected a hook below the Corolla’s rear bumper. I put it in neutral and gave him a thumbs-up. As the car began to roll backward out of the mud, a burgundy four-wheel pickup arrived on the other side of the ditch. A man in a weathered black baseball cap and Wrangler jeans stepped out and watched, hands on hips. I waved sheepishly from the driver’s seat.

  “That’s a treacherous spot,” the man observed. He had a ruddy beard and skin that was pink like rare roast beef, with freckles. After the car had been extricated, I paid Lonnie and Lonnie Jr. for the tow—$80 plus a $20 tip—and thanked them profusely. The man in the pickup introduced himself as the ranch manager. “You out here by yourself?” he asked. I felt uncomfortable, but couldn’t think of any plausible answer except for the honest one. So I mentioned Linda and asked what life was like out here. The manager told me he ran a herd of fifty Brangus cattle—hybrids of Brahman and Angus, bred for heat and drought—and that he’d been living on this land for twenty-six years. Things were mostly quiet here, he said, but sometimes drug mules came tromping through with heavy backpacks. Best to avoid them. He’d been shot at twice. Now he kept an AR-15 in his pickup.

  I drove away in the comically dirty rental car, with an inch of mud in the footwell, my sneaker squelching as it pressed the pedals. When a rainbow materialized above the land I’d just left, it felt cheesy—nature’s sarcasm?—but I stopped for a snapshot anyway.

  Back in downtown Douglas, I parked outside the Gadsden Hotel and ventured into the lobby. The cavernous, amber-colored room was as opulent as Linda had described, with Italianate columns, a sweeping marble staircase, and leather couches. (“Sitting in it feels like lounging in the den of a pirate who had a classical education,” a Los Angeles Times reporter once wrote.) The Tiffany glass window she had told me about was a forty-two-foot mural on the mezzanine. Its backlit panes depicted a desert scene in swirls of color—tan dirt, blue sky, purple mountains on the horizon, green yuccas in bloom. It could have been mistaken for an illustration of Linda’s own land, rendered in precious jewels. I wandered into Casa Segovia, the nearly empty hotel restaurant, and ordered a $7 plate of enchiladas and a michelada. The Tiffany landscape hung in my brain like an afterimage from a bright flash of light. I wanted to see Linda step into that kind of prettified wilderness: a southwestern Eden. But all afternoon I’d been fending off worries. Now that I was alone with my thoughts, they began creeping in.

  Two more days of driving would put Linda and Gary in Campbellsville, Kentucky. There they would spend the next five months working ten-hour night shifts in an Amazon warehouse. For Linda, the job was all about earning money to start building her home. Her heart was set on that. But as I thought about the remoteness of the land—along with the dizzying summer heat, armed drug mules, flash floods, and rattlesnakes—I wondered: Was the plan insane? In three years of mulling over Linda’s dream, I’d had doubts before. But mostly I’d shared the mantra of Fox Mulder on The X-Files: “I Want to Believe.”

  Later I sent Linda some notes with what I’d learned about the area—both good and bad, admitting my worries. I also emailed her a map with pictures of her land and its surroundings. She didn’t answer the first message but did write back from Amazon to tell me how happy she was about the photos. “I open them often and dream of being there,” Linda said. “I hate this fucking job and that helps to keep me going. Fifteen more weeks and I’ll be free.”

  Meanwhile, other concerns gathered in the pit of my stomach. Would Linda’s body hold up to the rigors of construction? I thought back to her first tour with Amazon in Fernley, Nevada, and the dizziness that landed her in the emergency room from the repetitive-motion injury she got from wielding a scanner gun. Her wrist had taken three years to heal. What if she got hurt again? Amazon had since switched to lighter barcode scanners—maybe that would help? I also worried that the job might wear her out. Though Linda was initially assigned to work as a stower, shelving merchandise, later in the season
she’d tell me managers were considering transferring her and other CamperForce laborers to more strenuous positions as pickers, collecting orders. The year before, one picker had worn a Fitbit to work, she’d tell me. On a single day it logged eighteen miles and forty-four flights of stairs.

  Even if Linda made it through her tour at Amazon, would she be able to save up enough money to start building the Earthship? The last time she worked for CamperForce, her base wage had been $11.50, before add-ons for night work and overtime. Now it was $10.75. (Linda had initially worked at the Fernley facility, which offered better wages than some other CamperForce locations, but that warehouse had closed in 2015.)

  I also worried about her morale. During Linda’s first season working for Amazon, she had seen up close the vast volume of crap Americans were buying and felt disgusted. That experience had planted a seed of disenchantment. After she left the warehouse, it continued to grow. When she had downsized from a large RV to a minuscule trailer, Linda had also been reading about minimalism and the tiny house movement. She had done a lot of thinking about consumer culture and about how much garbage people cram into their short lives. I wondered where all those thoughts would lead.

  Linda was still grappling with them. Weeks later, after starting work in Kentucky, she would post the following message on Facebook and also text it directly to me:

  Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don’t need to impress people I don’t like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don’t have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won’t last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don’t have to see them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world.

  After sending that, she continued:

  Radical I know, but this is what goes through my head when I’m at work. There is nothing in that warehouse of substance. It enslaved the buyers who use their credit to purchase that shit. Keeps them in jobs they hate to pay their debts. It’s really depressing to be there.

  Linda added that she was coping with “the moral issue. How to honor the money I’m making to complete my plan. I know the money doesn’t know where it came from. In these times is there any other way to get the finances I need in the time I need them? My time on this Earth is short.”

  She distilled her feelings in one final line: “It’s like a bank robber doing his last job in order to retire.”

  But back in Douglas, Linda hadn’t told me any of that yet. I picked at my plate of enchiladas and wondered what would happen next. When I got on the road, the sun was setting. I drove north on Interstate 191. The rain that had threatened all day hadn’t come, but the clouds had moved west and now sat over the Mule Mountains. In between them and the peaks was a crack of sky. The last rays of daylight flared through it, painting conch shell colors—all pinks and tangerines—before fading to a deep red. In twenty miles I turned left, continuing along the upper edge of the Mules. It was dark now. Jags of lightning flickered above the Dragoon range to the north.

  I passed through Tombstone—“the town too tough to die”—and stopped at the Texaco in Benson. Above the fuel pumps an illuminated canopy cast a daylight-bright glare and moths and beetles flew drunken spirals—a bug disco. My phone pinged with a text message from Linda: “Did you make it back to town?” she asked. Yes, I replied. She told me that, after we’d lost contact in the desert, she and Gary had progressed seventy miles on their cross-country journey to Kentucky before stopping for the night in Springfield, Missouri. “We have been driving three hundred miles a day,” she added. “Gary is very fatigued and the heat is kicking my ass.”

  “I’m glad you’re getting close!” I wrote back. Then I gave up on texting and called her. Our conversation turned back to the land.

  “It was beautiful,” Linda said. “When you put your hand in the dirt I was like, ‘Damn, that’s nice dirt!’” Then she told me more about Gary. “He really likes me,” she said. “And he’s done about as many jobs as I have!” Gary had run a radiology department, managed a grocery store, and worked in construction, she elaborated. “And he is very intelligent and has a good memory. And beautiful handwriting. And he’s very good with numbers, does all kinds of math shit in his head.”

  Would he want to help build an Earthship? “I don’t know if he wants to put down roots,” she mused. “But he says that I have a really good plan. I’m not imaging things. It’s not just some fantasy. It’s something doable.” No matter what happened between them, Linda added, she would keep the desert property in her name alone. Homesteading was her dream, after all.

  What mattered now was reaching Kentucky and making it until Christmas. She could already see the other side of Amazon: getting released with cash and a plan to use it, driving to Arizona to camp on her land. Sifting the dirt between her own fingers, planning a future. That image was getting her through the miles of driving. If anything could, it would push her through nights at Amazon. The gravitational pull of her own piece of the country. She’d spent so many years planning. She was ready to release all that pent-up thinking in action.

  “I’m happy, happy, happy,” she told me. “I can’t wait to get there and do it.”

  After that we hung up. It was getting late and Linda had another long day of driving ahead.

  CODA

  The Octopus in the Coconut

  IT’S EARLY WINTER IN AMERICA. Snowstorms ride the jet stream, painting a broad white brushstroke across the continent from west to east.

  High in the San Bernardino Mountains of California, snow swirls through the Jeffrey pines and settles onto unoccupied campsites at Hanna Flat. It falls upon the silent drywall factory and empty houses of Empire, Nevada. In North Dakota, it blankets the sleeping sugar beet fields. It flurries around the Amazon warehouse in Campbellsville, Kentucky, and nearby RV parks, where CamperForce workers live.

  But in a small town in the Sonoran Desert, the sun shines and afternoon temperatures climb into the seventies. The annual migration to Quartzsite has begun, with tens of thousands of nomads streaming in from all over the country. They reunite around evening campfires, telling stories from the year that’s nearly over, making plans for the one about to begin.

  Swankie Wheels is back in Quartzsite after camp hosting through early autumn in the Colorado Rockies, where she celebrated her seventy-second birthday and cracked three ribs on the job. After struggling through cold nights in her unheated van, she installs a small pop-up tent within the vehicle, cocooning it around her bed as she sleeps. Looking ahead, she trains for a new challenge: hiking the 800-mile Arizona Trail.

  Silvianne Delmars is camped near Swankie. By day she works the register at Gem World, an outlet in town that sells crystals and jewelry-making supplies. One night at a karaoke potluck dinner, she gets up the nerve to sing her anthem, “Queen of the Road,” in front of two dozen people, to cheers and applause. And she’s preparing to go on her first date in seven years—dinner with a handsome RVer she met at the ranger station.

  LaVonne Ellis has returned to Ehrenberg after a two-week stint at Standing Rock, where she joined protesters fighting the North Dakota Access Pipeline. In the quiet of the desert, she pushes through writer’s block to finish a short childhood memoir, The Red-Feather Christmas Tree, which she publishes on Amazon. (“Linda May never doubted,” it says in the acknowledgments.) Later she visits Los Algodones for cheap eyeglasses. For the future she’s conceiving a new dream: buying land near Taos, New Mexico, where she can permanently park
an old school bus, creating a home base to inhabit between her van trips.

  Bob Wells is also in Ehrenberg, getting ready to host the largest-ever Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. Anticipating hundreds of people, he sets new rules for the two-week gathering, banning loud music and unleashed dogs. And he removes traditional group meals from the calendar of events, figuring they’ll be too hard to organize with so many mouths to feed. (Little does he know: More than five hundred mobile dwellings will roll into the event this year, many drawn by videos he’s been posting on YouTube.)

  More nomads will arrive soon. Among them is David Swanson, the former professional potter who lives in a salvaged Prius. David is excited to go back to the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, where he gave onlookers a tour of his vehicle last year. For now he’s parked on Padre Island in Texas. In a Facebook message to me, he describes it as “a nomadic paradise” where both cars and tents are legal for beach camping. Then he asks, “Will you be going to RTR 2017?”

  I type my regrets: “I have been to the last three RTRs and it’s killing me that I can’t make it to this one.” I tell David I’m trying to finish the book I’ve been writing.

  “Good luck on the word slinging!” he replies cheerfully. “Stay busy!”

  But David’s question opens a hollow in my chest. After three years documenting the nomads, missing the RTR feels wrong. I repeat to myself a cardinal rule of nonfiction writing: The story keeps unfolding into the future, but at some point you step away.