Nomadland
Nomadland
SURVIVING AMERICA IN THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
JESSICA BRUDER
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923
NEW YORK LONDON
For Dale
“There’s a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.”
—LEONARD COHEN
“The capitalists don’t want anyone living off their economic grid.”
—ANONYMOUS COMMENTER,
AZDAILYSUN.COM
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Part One
1. The Squeeze Inn
2. The End
3. Surviving America
4. Escape Plan
Part Two
5. Amazon Town
6. The Gathering Place
7. The Rubber Tramp Rendezvous
8. Halen
9. Some Unbeetable Experiences
Part Three
10. The H Word
11. Homecoming
Coda: The Octopus in the Coconut
Acknowledgments
Notes
FOREWORD
AS I WRITE THIS, they are scattered across the country—
In Drayton, North Dakota, a former San Francisco cabdriver, sixty-seven, labors at the annual sugar beet harvest. He works from sunrise until after sunset in temperatures that dip below freezing, helping trucks that roll in from the fields disgorge multi-ton loads of beets. At night he sleeps in the van that has been his home ever since Uber squeezed him out of the taxi industry and making the rent became impossible.
In Campbellsville, Kentucky, a sixty-six-year-old ex–general contractor stows merchandise during the overnight shift at an Amazon warehouse, pushing a wheeled cart for miles along the concrete floor. It’s mind-numbing work and she struggles to scan each item accurately, hoping to avoid getting fired. In the morning she returns to her tiny trailer, moored at one of several mobile home parks that contract with Amazon to put up nomadic workers like her.
In New Bern, North Carolina, a woman whose home is a teardrop-style trailer—so small it can be pulled with a motorcycle—is couch-surfing with a friend while hunting for work. Even with a master’s degree, the thirty-eight-year-old Nebraska native can’t find a job despite filling out hundreds of applications in the past month alone. She knows the sugar beet harvest is hiring, but traveling halfway across the country would require more cash than she has. Losing her job at a non-profit several years ago is one of the reasons she moved into the trailer in the first place. After the funding for her position ran out, she couldn’t afford rent on top of paying off student loans.
In San Marcos, California, a thirtysomething couple in a 1975 GMC motorhome is running a roadside pumpkin stand with a children’s carnival and petting zoo, which they had five days to set up from scratch on a vacant dirt lot. In a few weeks they’ll switch to selling Christmas trees.
In Colorado Springs, Colorado, a seventy-two-year-old vandweller who cracked three ribs doing a campground maintenance job is recuperating while visiting with family.
THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ITINERANTS, drifters, hobos, restless souls. But now, in the second millennium, a new kind of wandering tribe is emerging. People who never imagined being nomads are hitting the road. They’re giving up traditional houses and apartments to live in what some call “wheel estate”—vans, secondhand RVs, school buses, pickup campers, travel trailers, and plain old sedans. They are driving away from the impossible choices that face what used to be the middle class. Decisions like:
Would you rather have food or dental work? Pay your mortgage or your electric bill? Make a car payment or buy medicine? Cover rent or student loans? Purchase warm clothes or gas for your commute?
For many the answer seemed radical at first.
You can’t give yourself a raise, but what about cutting your biggest expense? Trading a stick-and-brick domicile for life on wheels?
Some call them “homeless.” The new nomads reject that label. Equipped with both shelter and transportation, they’ve adopted a different word. They refer to themselves, quite simply, as “houseless.”
From a distance, many of them could be mistaken for carefree retired RVers. On occasions when they treat themselves to a movie or dinner at a restaurant, they blend with the crowd. In mind-set and appearance, they are largely middle class. They wash their clothes at Laundromats and join fitness clubs to use the showers. Many took to the road after their savings were obliterated by the Great Recession. To keep their gas tanks and bellies full, they work long hours at hard, physical jobs. In a time of flat wages and rising housing costs, they have unshackled themselves from rent and mortgages as a way to get by. They are surviving America.
But for them—as for anyone—survival isn’t enough. So what began as a last-ditch effort has become a battle cry for something greater. Being human means yearning for more than subsistence. As much as food or shelter, we require hope.
And there is hope on the road. It’s a by-product of forward momentum. A sense of opportunity, as wide as the country itself.
A bone-deep conviction that something better will come. It’s just ahead, in the next town, the next gig, the next chance encounter with a stranger.
As it happens, some of those strangers are nomads, too. When they meet—online, or at a job, or camping way off the grid—tribes begin to form. There’s a common understanding, a kinship. When someone’s van breaks down, they pass the hat. There’s a contagious feeling: Something big is happening. The country is changing rapidly, the old structures crumbling away, and they’re at the epicenter of something new. Around a shared campfire, in the middle of the night, it can feel like a glimpse of utopia.
As I write, it is autumn. Soon winter will come. Routine layoffs will start at the seasonal jobs. The nomads will pack up camp and return to their real home—the road—moving like blood cells through the veins of the country. They’ll set out in search of friends and family, or just a place that’s warm. Some will journey clear across the continent. All will count the miles, which unspool like a filmstrip of America. Fast-food joints and shopping malls. Fields dormant under frost. Auto dealerships, megachurches, and all-night diners. Featureless plains. Feedlots, dead factories, subdivisions, and big-box stores. Snowcapped peaks. The roadside reels past, through the day and into darkness, until fatigue sets in. Bleary-eyed, they find places to pull off the road and rest. In Walmart parking lots. On quiet suburban streets. At truck stops, amid the lullaby of idling engines. Then in the early morning hours—before anyone notices—they’re back on the highway. Driving on, they’re secure in this knowledge:
The last free place in America is a parking spot.
Part One
CHAPTER ONE
The Squeeze Inn
ON THE FOOTHILL FREEWAY, about an hour inland from Los Angeles, a mountain range looms ahead of northbound traffic, bringing suburbia to a sudden stop. This wilderness is the southern edge of the San Bernardino Mountains, a “tall, precipitous escarpment” in the words of the United States Geological Survey. It’s part of a formation that began growing eleven million years ago along the San Andreas Fault and is still rising today, gaining a few millimeters each year as the Pacific and North American plates grind past each other. The peaks appear to grow much faster, however, when you’re driving straight at them. They’re the kind of sight that makes you sit up straighter and starts a swelling sensation in your chest, a feeling like helium crowding your ribcage, enough perhaps to carry you away.
Linda May grips her steering wheel and watches the approaching mountains through bifocals with rose-colored frames. Her silver hair, which falls past her shoulders, is pulled back from her face in a plastic barrette. She turns off the Foothill Free
way onto Highway 330, also known as City Creek Road. For a couple miles the pavement runs flat and wide. Then it tapers to a steep serpentine, with just one lane in either direction, starting the ascent into the San Bernardino National Forest.
The sixty-four-year-old grandmother is driving a Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo, which was totaled and salvaged before she bought it off a tow lot. The “check engine” light is finicky—it has a habit of flashing on when nothing is actually wrong—and a close look reveals that the white paint on the hood, which was crumpled and replaced, is a half-shade off from the rest of the body. But after months of repairs the vehicle is finally roadworthy. A mechanic installed a new camshaft and lifters. Linda spruced up what she could, scrubbing the foggy headlights with an old T-shirt and insect repellant, a do-it-yourself trick. For the first time the Jeep is towing Linda’s home: a tiny, pale yellow trailer she calls “the Squeeze Inn.” (If visitors don’t get the name on first mention, she puts it in a sentence—“Yeah, there’s room, squeeze in!”—and smiles, revealing deep laugh lines.) The trailer is a molded fiberglass relic, a Hunter Compact II, built in 1974 and originally advertised as a “crowning achievement in travel for fun” that would “follow like a kitten on the open road, track like a tiger when the going gets rough.” Four decades along, the Squeeze Inn feels like a charmingly retro life-support capsule: a box with rounded edges and sloped sides, geometrically reminiscent of the Styrofoam clamshell containers once used at hamburger joints. Inside it measures ten feet from end to end, roughly the same interior length as the covered wagon that carried Linda’s own great-great-great-grandmother across the country more than a century ago. It has some distinctive 1970s’ touches: quilted, cream-colored pleather covering the walls and ceiling, linoleum with a mustard and avocado pattern on the floor. The roof is just high enough for Linda to stand. After buying the trailer at auction for $1,400, she described it on Facebook. “It’s 5'3" inside and I am 5'2",” she wrote. “Perfect fit.”
Linda is hauling the Squeeze Inn up to Hanna Flat, a campground in the pine forest northwest of Big Bear Lake. It’s May and she plans to stay there through September. But unlike the thousands of warm-weather visitors who travel for pleasure each year to the San Bernardino National Forest—a swath of wilderness larger than the state of Rhode Island—Linda is making this journey for work. It’s her third summer employed as a campground host: a seasonal gig that’s equal parts janitor, cashier, groundskeeper, security guard, and welcoming committee. She’s enthusiastic about starting the job and getting the annual raise for returning workers that will bump her hourly wage to $9.35, up 20 cents over the year before. (At the time, California’s minimum wage was $9.00 an hour.) And though she and other campground hosts are hired “at will,” according to the company’s written employment policy—meaning they can be fired “at any time, with or without cause or notice”—she’s been told to expect a full forty hours of work each week.
Linda May with her dog, Coco.
Some first-time campground hosts expect a paid vacation in paradise. It’s hard to blame them. Ads for the job are splashed with photos of glittering creeks and wildflower-choked meadows. A brochure for California Land Management, the private concessionaire that is Linda’s employer, shows gray-haired women smiling delightedly on a sun-dappled lakeshore, arm in arm, like best friends at summer camp. “Get paid to go camping!” cajoles a recruiting banner for American Land & Leisure, another company that hires camp hosts. Below the headline are testimonials: “Our staff says: ‘Retirement has never been this fun!’ ‘We’ve developed lifelong friendships,’ ‘We’re healthier than we’ve been in years.’”
Newbies are known for balking—and sometimes quitting—when faced with the less picturesque parts of the job: babysitting drunk, noisy campers, shoveling heaps of ash and broken glass from the campfire pits (rowdy visitors like dropping bottles into the flames to make them explode), and the thrice-daily ritual of cleaning outhouses. Though tending toilets is most campground hosts’ least-favorite chore, Linda is unfazed by it, even takes a little pride in performing the task well. “I want them clean because my campers are using them,” she says. “I’m not a germaphobe—you snap on some rubber gloves, and you do it.”
As Linda reaches the San Bernardino Mountains, the valley views are sublime but distracting. The roadside is narrow, with barely enough of an edge to call a shoulder. Along some stretches there’s nothing but empty air past the ribbon of pavement that clings to the slope. Signposts warn drivers: “Rock Slide Area” and “Avoid Overheating: Turn Off A/C Next 14 Miles.” None of this seems to rattle Linda, though. Her stint as a long-haul trucker nearly two decades ago left her undaunted by difficult roads.
I’m driving a camper van just ahead of Linda. As a journalist, I’ve been spending time with her, on and off, for a year and a half. Between in-person visits, we’ve spoken on the phone so many times that, on every call, I anticipate her familiar greeting before she even picks up. It’s a melodic “Hell-ooo-ooo,” spoken in the same three-note singsong you’d use to say “I see you!” when playing peekaboo with an infant.
I’d originally met Linda while researching a magazine story on a growing subculture of American nomads, folks who live full-time on the road.* Like Linda, many of these wandering souls were trying to escape an economic paradox: the collision of rising rents and flat wages, an unstoppable force meeting an unmovable object. They felt like they were caught in a vise, putting all their time into exhausting, soul-sucking jobs that paid barely enough to cover the rent or a mortgage, with no way to better their lot for the long term and no promise of ever being able to retire.
Those feelings were grounded in hard fact: Wages and housing costs have diverged so dramatically that, for a growing number of Americans, the dream of a middle-class life has gone from difficult to impossible. As I write this, there are only a dozen counties and one metro area in America where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent. You’d have to make at least $16.35 an hour—more than twice the federal minimum wage—to rent such an apartment without spending more than the recommended 30 percent of income on housing. The consequences are dire, especially for the one in six American households that have been putting more than half of what they make into shelter. For many low-income families, that means little or nothing left over to buy food, medication, and other essentials.
Many of the people I met felt that they’d spent too long losing a rigged game. And so they found a way to hack the system. They gave up traditional “stick-and-brick” homes, breaking the shackles of rent and mortgages. They moved into vans, RVs, and trailers, traveled from place to place following good weather, and kept their gas tanks full by working seasonal jobs. Linda is a member of that tribe. As she migrates around the West, I’ve been following her.
When the steep climb into the San Bernardino Mountains begins, my giddiness at seeing the peaks from a distance fades. Suddenly I’m anxious. The idea of driving switchbacks in my clunky van scares me a little. Watching Linda pull the Squeeze Inn in her rattletrap Jeep scares me a lot. Earlier she instructed me to drive ahead of her. She wanted to be in the rear, following. But why? Did she think her trailer could come unhitched and backslide? I never did find out.
Past the first sign for the San Bernardino National Forest, a shiny oil tanker truck looms up behind the Squeeze Inn. The driver seems impatient, a bit too close as they enter a series of S-curves that obscures Linda from my sight in the rearview mirror. I keep watching for her Jeep. When the road straightens out again, it doesn’t emerge. Instead, the tanker reappears on the uphill straightaway. There’s no sign of Linda.
Pulling into a turnout, I dial her cell phone and hope for that familiar “Hell-ooo-ooo.” The call rings and rings, then goes to voicemail. I park the van, hop out, and pace nervously along the driver’s side. I try again. No answer. By now, more cars—maybe half a dozen—have come out of the curves, onto the straightaway, and past the turnout. I try to push
down a queasy feeling, adrenaline blooming into panic as the minutes slide past. The Squeeze Inn has disappeared.
FOR MONTHS, LINDA HAD BEEN YEARNING to get back on the road and start her job as a campground host. She’d been marooned in Mission Viejo, fifty miles southeast of Los Angeles, staying at the house rented by her daughter and son-in-law, Audra and Collin, with three of her grandchildren, all teenagers. There weren’t enough bedrooms, so her grandson Julian bunked in a door-less dining space off the kitchen. (This setup was more comfortable than the family’s last apartment, however, where a walk-in closet had doubled as a bedroom for one of her two granddaughters.)
Linda got what was left: the couch by the front door. It was an island. As much as she adored her family, she still felt stranded there, especially with her Jeep stuck in the repair shop. Whenever members of the household planned an outing that didn’t include her, everyone had to walk past Linda’s couch on the way to the door. That started getting awkward. Linda worried: Did they feel guilty spending time without her? She also missed her autonomy. “I’d rather be the queen of my own house than live under the queen of somebody else’s house, even if it is my daughter,” she told me.
At the same time, health problems had left the family stretched thin—emotionally and financially—making it even harder for Linda to lean on them. Her granddaughter Gabbi had been weak and intermittently bedridden for more than three years with a mysteriously malfunctioning nervous system; she later tested positive for Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease. Julian, her grandson, was managing type 1 diabetes. Her daughter, Audra, had bad arthritis. And if that weren’t enough, Collin, the breadwinner, had recently developed severe migraines and vertigo that forced him out of his office job.