Nomadland

by Jessica Bruder

  I’m incorrect about the last part, though, because the story has followed me home. In Brooklyn, tiny houses on wheels are ubiquitous. I cannot stop seeing them.

  On a side street with unmetered parking near my apartment in Boerum Hill, there’s a silver high-top Ford camper van with a nazar—a medallion to ward off the evil eye—dangling from its rearview mirror. The windows are tinted dark, almost black, with drawn blinds behind them.

  A short walk from my sister’s building in Bed-Stuy, there’s an old motorhome stationed across from a commercial truck lot. A privacy curtain in the back of the cab is pulled shut. Heat-trapping foil insulation blocks the glass in the sleeping loft. Near the rear-mounted spare tire, trash bags and duct tape cover an empty socket that once held a window.

  More camper vans and an occasional RV dock at the edge of Prospect Park. They cluster near low-slung warehouses in Gowanus and Crown Heights, where there are no neighbors to complain. These mobile shelters are everywhere—an invisible city, hidden in plain sight.

  The night after the season’s first snowfall, I visit Red Hook, one of the last stretches of industrial waterfront in Brooklyn. The backstreets are dim and lined with a motley assortment of work vehicles—contractors’ vans, delivery fleets, food trucks, utility trailers—providing good cover to mix among for urban campers. Before long I start seeing them: An ancient travel trailer shaped like a tinned ham. A Chevy Astro van with the telltale privacy curtain, its cabin windows blocked with plastic sheeting and American flags. A converted transit shuttle with tinted glass, jaunty red hubcaps, and a propane furnace welded above the rear bumper to provide heat when the engine’s off. Plenty of late-model camper vans, their blinds drawn.

  The most spectacular dwelling of all is a short yellow school bus. Its windows are covered with sheet metal for zero visibility. Glinting at the edge of the roof, barely noticeable from the ground, are the aluminum frames of four perfectly aligned solar panels. A drape hangs behind the windshield, which has condensation on its inner surface—another tell. It is parked looking out on the East River, with an unobstructed view of the Statue of Liberty.

  The journalist in me wants to knock on the door. But then memories of stealth parking return—how it feels to hide behind covered windows, your heartbeat quickening at a stranger’s approaching footsteps.

  I walk away.

  Encountering so many nomads around Brooklyn is eye-opening. It’s not the first time this project has hit close to home, though. Midway through reporting, I learned that Swankie’s younger son, a software engineer from Seattle, is someone I’d met years earlier at Burning Man. Later on, LaVonne and I realized that one of her dear friends is married to a journalist pal of mine in Berkeley. Both times I wondered: What are the odds of that?

  Maybe not so low. After all, millions of Americans are wrestling with the impossibility of a traditional middle-class existence. In homes across the country, kitchen tables are strewn with unpaid bills. Lights burn late into the night. The same calculations get performed again and again, over and over, through exhaustion and sometimes tears. Wages minus grocery receipts. Minus medical bills. Minus credit card debt. Minus utility fees. Minus student loan and car payments. Minus the biggest expense of all: rent.

  In the widening gap between credits and debits hangs a question: What parts of this life are you willing to give up, so you can keep on living?

  Most who face this dilemma will not end up dwelling in vehicles. Those who do are analogous to what biologists call an “indicator species”—sensitive organisms with the capacity to signal much larger shifts in an ecosystem.

  Like the nomads, millions of Americans are being forced to change their lives, even if the transformations are less outwardly radical. There are many ways to parse the challenge of survival. This month, will you skip meals? Go to the ER instead of your doctor? Postpone the credit card bills, hoping they won’t go to collections? Put off paying electric and gas charges, hoping the light and heat will stay on? Let the interest accumulate on student and car loans, hoping someday you’ll find a way to catch up?

  These indignities underscore a larger question: When do impossible choices start to tear people—a society—apart?

  It’s already happening. The cause of the unmanageable household math that’s keeping people up at night is no secret. The top 1 percent now makes eighty-one times what those in the bottom half do, when you compare average earnings. For American adults on the lower half of the income ladder—some 117 million of them—earnings haven’t changed since the 1970s.

  This is not a wage gap—it’s a chasm. And the cost of that growing divide is paid by everyone.

  “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops,” reflected the late writer Stephen Jay Gould. A deepening class divide makes social mobility all but impossible. The result is a de facto caste system. This is not only morally wrong but also tremendously wasteful. Denying access to opportunity for large segments of the population means throwing away vast reserves of talent and brainpower. It’s also been shown to dampen economic growth.

  The most widely accepted measure for calculating income inequality is a century-old formula called the Gini coefficient. It’s a gold standard for economists around the globe, along with the World Bank, the CIA, and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. What it reveals is startling. Today the United States has the most unequal society of all developed nations. America’s level of inequality is comparable to that of Russia, China, Argentina, and the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  And as bad as the situation is now, it’s likely to get worse. That makes me wonder: What further contortions—or even mutations—of the social order will appear in years to come? How many people will get crushed by the system? How many will find a way to escape it?

  A FEW DAYS AFTER WE FIRST MET, Linda noticed an octopus-shaped ring on my right hand. “Have you ever seen an octopus in a laboratory, how smart they are?” she marveled. “They’re escape artists!”

  Linda described a video she’d seen online: “So there’s food in this other tank, and this big octopus is in the first tank all by himself. He squishes himself down into a tube and he gets over to the other tank.” More experiments followed. “They kept making it more difficult and more difficult,” she added. “Like he had to open a hatch and then get into a tube.”

  No matter what, the octopus got out.

  “Sometimes people can be like that,” I suggested.

  “Yeah, if you try to keep us in a box,” Linda said. She laughed.

  I think of that conversation much later, when Linda links to a new video on her Facebook page. The footage shows an octopus traversing the ocean floor. Its gait is an awkward shuffle and a caption points out why—the octopus is carrying a pair of empty coconut halves. Suddenly it jumps inside them. Drawing the shells close to its body, it continues the journey, rolling along like a tentacled bowling ball.

  The octopus had created a tool for both transportation and protection—a sort of coconut mobile home. A scuba diver in Indonesia had captured the moment on video. Linda posts a comment calling it “the cutest, smartest octopus ever.”

  LINDA’S ON THE ROAD AGAIN. Released from her seasonal job at the Amazon warehouse in Campbellsville, Kentucky, she begins her westward trek. Gary has stayed behind to work longer, so this time she travels alone, towing the Squeeze Inn behind her Jeep through short winter days and long, dark nights.

  Her first destination is Taos, New Mexico. There she plans to visit her favorite Earthship, the Nautilus, and consult an architect about adapting the design to her needs. Then she’ll continue to the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. After that, she’ll drive to the desert near Douglas, Arizona, to lay eyes on the land that is her future.

  But outside Taos, the “Check Engine” light appears on the instrument panel of her Jeep. She hears snows
torms are rolling into the area. Hoping to avoid a bad-weather breakdown while driving through the mountains, Linda reshuffles her itinerary and heads straight to Douglas.

  She arrives without incident. On the first night, she camps in the parking lot of an abandoned Safeway, even as predawn temperatures drop below freezing. The next day, she finds a cut-rate RV park on the fairgrounds north of town. A couple from Montana is staying in the spot next to her. They live in a gutted seventeen-foot Airstream trailer that’s seen better days. Linda tells them about her Earthship and shows them the three-ring binder full of plans.

  We catch up on the phone a day later. She tells me that, apart from the abandoned plan to visit Taos, her return trip from Kentucky was smooth. “The weather was perfect!” she says. “I ran into three raindrops the whole time.” The trip only took three days. She’s still at the RV park, which costs just $15 a night. Today she got to shower; during the journey she subsisted on baby wipes. “I’ve been sitting in my trailer and resting,” she says, letting out a contented sigh.

  And she has visited her five acres. The patch of desert she first saw in photographs on Craigslist last spring—and then as a video feed on her smartphone over the summer—has become three-dimensional. The land is real, tangible, an environment through which she has walked. She swears she even heard a rattlesnake there. “It’s beautiful,” she says.

  Now the future feels urgently close. “I’m sixty-six,” she says matter-of-factly. “I need to speed things up here. I want to be able to relax and enjoy it at some point.”

  The details come out in a torrent. Linda tells me she just bought a 4,000-watt portable generator for $26—more than half off. “Oh my god, I got electricity!” she crows. It’ll run as loud as a vacuum cleaner, but that doesn’t bother her. Its output dwarfs the trickle of power she’s been getting from a 45-watt solar panel.

  Linda describes finding an inexpensive water delivery service near her land that can fill large tanks. (Though Earthships have cisterns to collect rainfall, there may not be enough of it, and she’ll need to sustain herself through the building process.) She talks about having the land surveyed—she’ll need to know the elevations before cutting berms for permaculture. And tomorrow she will visit the county buildings department to learn about setbacks—how far from the road she must build—and other zoning particulars.

  “I already read on their website that you can clear up to an acre without a grading permit,” she says. “That’s all I wanted to do anyway.”

  Linda plans to start construction after the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. Gary has agreed to return to the land with her. LaVonne’s going, too. Together, they will start building a greenhouse, which will allow for organic farming and provide protection from the elements during the construction of her home.

  Linda can see it now, as if the pictures in her three-ring binder have come to life. The Earthship she has imagined for so many years rises from a barren patch of desert. She builds it with her own determined hands, with help from friends who have become a family. When it’s done—and it will be done—the Earthship will shelter them. With renewable systems for food, water, power, heating, and cooling, it will be a home but also a living thing, an organism that exists in harmony with the desert. It will outlive them all.

  That future begins in the new year, which is only weeks away. Linda has already planned the first step: breaking ground. She’s found an excavator operator who charges $35 an hour, with nothing extra for gas or travel. “His time starts when his butt hits the tractor seat,” she says happily. She’s spoken with him and reserved a date in late January.

  The project should take eight hours, she tells me. This is how it goes:

  First the excavator clears the overgrown access road, opening a path to her land. Next it scrapes out a driveway, somewhere the Squeeze Inn can park.

  Finally it starts working on the main construction site. The arm extends. The bucket dips. Metal teeth bite into the ground, over and over, as the excavator tears at tough desert scrub. Everything it touches yields: the gnarled brush, the hardy cactus, the heavy stone. These are obstacles standing in the way of Linda’s future. One by one, they get lifted away.

  Soon the job is done. When the excavator departs, Linda walks into the flat, blank space it left behind. This land is ready for her now—one perfect acre, something to build on.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  You meet a lot of people in three years and 15,000 miles. This book exists due to their kindness. I’m thankful to everyone on the road who shared wisdom, bad jokes, campfires, and coffee and to everyone back home whose support made the journey possible.

  My deepest gratitude goes to Linda May. Trusting someone to tell your story is no small thing, particularly when the writer hangs around, on and off, for three years, sleeps in a van outside your daughter’s house, and jogs after your campground maintenance golf cart while scribbling on a notepad. I hope Linda’s resilience—along with her wit and large heart—will move others as they did me.

  A couple hundred nomads shared their time and leave traces here. They are too numerous to list, but I’m especially thankful to LaVonne Ellis, Silvianne Delmars, Bob Wells, Charlene Swankie (aka “Swankie Wheels”), Iris Goldberg, Peter Fox, Ghost Dancer, Barb and Chuck Stout, Lois Middleton, Phil and Robin DePeal, Gary Fallon, Lois Middleton, David Roderick, Al Christiansen, Lou Brochetti, Jen Derge, Ash Haag, Vincent Mosemann, David Swanson, Mike, Kat, and Alex Valentino and, of course, to Don Wheeler, man of mystery.

  Enthusiastic support came from the Columbia School of Journalism, especially my colleagues Ruth Padawer and David Hajdu. The Rockefeller Foundation provided a month at the Bellagio Center, a place made magical by the hard work of Pilar Palaciá and Claudia Juech. My cohorts there (aka “Il Convivio”) shared camaraderie, deep insight, and spontaneous dance parties. Extra appreciation goes to photographer Todd Gray, who asked the right questions at the right time (and also took my picture).

  James Marcus at Harper’s was the first editor who believed in this story and is a model of human decency. Other allies on the Harper’s article included Giulia Melucci, Sharon J. Riley, and the talented photographer Max Whittaker, whose images accompanied it. Lizzy Ratner and Sarah Leonard at The Nation, Clara Germani at The Christian Science Monitor, and Alissa Quart at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project all supported parts of what became the book.

  Joy Harris, my fierce nurturer of an agent, “got” this project from the start with profound empathy. Editor Alane Mason at Norton pulled it together with a steady hand. Adam Reed, Ashley Patrick, Kyle Radler, and Laura Goldin also helped a great deal.

  Michael Evans, Robert and Karen Kopfstein, Jerry Hirsch, Stella Ru, and Stu Levin gave (literal) shelter to me and Halen. Ann Cusack sent me off with a care package including such sundries as Neosporin and Irish Spring, along with a small American flag. Lonnie and Lonnie Jr. of Nalley’s Pit Stop in Douglas, Arizona, hauled my wheels out of the mud. Aaron, Bill, and the crack team of mechanics at Conklin Cars in Hutchinson, Kansas, stayed open after business hours to fix my alternator.

  I’m grateful to my family: My father Ron helped co-pilot Halen during much of the journey back East. My mother Susan (the soon-to-be “Dr. Bruder”) taught me how to write from early days. My sister Megyn is fierce and fabulous and one of the best things about being back home. Max the dog (aka Mutt-Mutt Wagglebutt) sighed and snuggled beside me through long writing nights.

  I’m very lucky for my community, or “logical family,” including Douglas Wolk, Rebecca Fitting, Chris Taylor, Jess Taylor Wolfe, Caroline Miller, Josh and Lowen Hunter, Sarah Fan, Chris Hackett, Sarah McMillan, Dorothy Trojanowski, Eleanor Lovinsky, Marlene Kryza, Julia Solis, John Law, Christos Pathiakis, Robert Kutruff, Rob Schmitt, Stacey Cowley, David Dyte, B’Anna Federico, Nate Smith, Raya Dukhan, Michael Evenson, Ellen Taylor, Clark McCasland, Martha Prakelt, Baris Ulku, Shel Kimen, Iva Skoch, James Mastrangelo, Niambi Person Jackson, Amelia Klein, Anthony Tranguch, and David Carr, whom I miss terribly.
I’m also thankful to my tribes: the Madagascar Institute, the Flaming Lotus Girls, Illumination Village, 29 Hour Music People, and Dark Passage.

  Co-conspirator Julia Moburg (aka “Surfer Julia”) helped keep me in balance. She is better than marmosets and more than I deserve.

  This book is dedicated to my best friend, Dale Maharidge. For the past fourteen years, you’ve been the voice that answered the phone, no matter the hour.

  We are what a modern family looks like.

  NOTES

  Some of the reporting throughout this book originally appeared in my article “The End of Retirement: When You Can’t Afford to Stop Working,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2014.

  Sources’ ages correspond to the chronology of their stories, rather than the time of publication. All of the people in this book are referred to by their real names, except for Don Wheeler and the people I met while I was working at the sugar beet harvest and CamperForce.

  Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device's search function to locate particular terms in the text.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Much of the reporting in this chapter dates to May 2015, when I traveled with Linda May to Hanna Flat Campground in the San Bernardino National Forest to document her experience working there.

  3. United States Geological Survey on San Bernardino Mountains: https://geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/archive/socal/geology/transverse_ranges/san_bernardino_mtns.

  3. San Bernardino Mountains still rising: Paul W. Bierman-Lytle, “Case Study: San Bernardino and Urban Communities Interface: Historical, Contemporary and Future,” in Climate Change Impacts on High-Altitude Ecosystems, ed. Münir Öztürk et al. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2015, pp. 292–93.

  4. Hunter Compact II vintage advertising brochure: Downloaded from a repository of old RV brochures: http://www.fiberglassrv.com/forums/downloads//ec_tmp/CompactIIBrochure.pdf.