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  At one point, Linda had considered applying for a seasonal position at an Amazon warehouse through CamperForce, a program created by the online retailer to hire itinerant workers. But she had done the same job a year earlier and ended up with a repetitive motion injury from using the handheld barcode scanner. It left behind a visible mark, a grape-sized lump on her right wrist. Even worse was what she could not see: a searing pain that radiated the length of her right arm, from thumb to wrist, through elbow and shoulder, ending in her neck. Lifting an eight-ounce coffee cup or a cooking pan was enough to trigger an agonizing jolt. She believed it to be a bad case of tendonitis, but knowing that hadn’t helped abolish the affliction. And without it healed, she couldn’t go back.

  Broke and confined to her couch-island, Linda tried to focus on her future as the proprietress—and sole occupant—of the Squeeze Inn. Before staying with her family, she’d been traveling from job to job in a twenty-eight-foot 1994 El Dorado motorhome that guzzled gas and was starting to fall apart. So downsizing to a tiny trailer felt good, even if the Squeeze Inn needed some work. The former owners had left it sitting in the salt air of the Oregon coast, where some of the metal parts had started to corrode; an orange rust streak marred the fiberglass hull. Linda began spending her downtime on mobile-home-improvement projects. Her first task was concocting an abrasive cleaner—the secret ingredient was eggshells run through a blender—that she used to remove the rust stain. Another task was creating a cozy bed. The trailer had a small dinette along its rear wall, so Linda removed the table and cut out a cardboard template to fit on top of the benches. When a queen-sized pillow-top mattress that looked brand-new appeared in the neighbors’ trash, she scavenged it. Slitting it open, she removed and discarded the springs like a fishmonger deboning a very large catch. Next she pulled out the layers of padding, marked them to fit her template with a Sharpie, and cut away the excess material using a carpet knife. Once she’d pared down the outer fabric to match, she sewed the case back together—trim and all—and re-stuffed it, creating what appeared to be a perfect seventy-two-by-thirty-six-inch mini-mattress. “I didn’t think any narrower would be fun to sleep on with my bed buddy here,” she told me, gesturing to Coco, her Cavalier King Charles spaniel. “So I made it thirty-six for the both of us.”

  The day before Linda left for Hanna Flat, I asked whether she was excited. She looked at me as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. “Oh, yeah!” she said. “I’ve had no car. I’ve had no money. I’ve been stuck on that couch.” Her $524 monthly Social Security checks would carry her to the first payday of her new job.† Linda was ready to feel her world opening up again after it had shrunk to the size of a sofa. For too long, she’d been without her accustomed freedom, that accelerated rush of newness and possibility that comes with the open road. It was time to go.

  The morning of May 6 was mild and overcast. Linda and her family members exchanged hugs good-bye. “Call you when I get there,” she promised. She loaded Coco into the Jeep and was off, heading to an automotive shop where she filled her mismatched tires, which were cracked and balding. The Jeep didn’t have a spare. Next up was a Shell station. She topped off the tank and then went inside for a receipt and a couple packs of Marlboro Red 100s. The young clerk nodded when she reminisced about buying gas as a teenager for a quarter a gallon, a far cry from the going rate of $3.79. “You could put a dollar in the tank and drive around all day,” she told him, shaking her head and smiling.

  It seemed nothing could darken Linda’s mood, not even returning to the Jeep to find the doors locked and the keys inside. Coco stood on her hind legs, paws up on the driver’s side door, tail wagging. The dog had stepped on the latch, Linda guessed. The window was rolled down a few inches, though. I retrieved a long-handled BBQ lighter from the van, squeezed my hand in the crack and used it to pop the lock. And so the journey continued.

  The Squeeze Inn was waiting in storage on the outskirts of Perris, a town on the far side of the Santa Ana Mountains, one of the peninsular ranges that separate California’s coastal region from its harsher desert interior. Getting there meant traveling the Ortega Highway. This is one of the most dangerous roads in the state, “a place where urban sprawl, bad driving and obsolete road-building techniques collide head-on,” in the words of one Los Angeles Times reporter. The winding thoroughfare is often clogged with commuters shuttling between Orange County and the Inland Empire, but at midday, traffic was mercifully light. Before long, Linda was on the other side, driving past some of the half-dozen trailer parks that cling like barnacle colonies to the western edge of Lake Elsinore. Three years ago she’d lived there at the Shore Acres Mobile Home Park, renting a $600-a-month trailer on a cracked asphalt lane that ran from the highway to the waterfront.

  At a Target store, Linda bought food to last until her next Social Security check came in a week: a big cardboard canister of Quaker Oats, a dozen and a half eggs, ground beef, bologna, hamburger buns, Goldfish crackers, Nutter Butters, tomatoes, mustard, and a half-gallon of milk. Although her start date for work was still a few days off, she called her soon-to-be boss from the parking lot. Linda wanted him to know she was reliable and took the job seriously. She was on her way, she told him, and planned to arrive at Hanna Flat before dark.

  Past a cyclone fence topped with barbed wire and sun-bleached American flags, the Squeeze Inn sat in a storage lot on the north side of Highway 74. Linda drove through the gate. The onsite handyman, a skinny guy named Rudy with a gray Van Dyke–style beard, came out to greet her. They joked around as Linda prepared the trailer, trying to remember everything on her to-do list. “I’ve got a mind like a steel trap: Nothing gets in, nothing gets out,” Rudy quipped. They were still chatting away when she stepped down too fast from the trailer’s door, tipping it off balance. The Squeeze Inn seesawed on its single axle. Its rear edge clattered to the ground. “Shouldn’t have had that cinnamon roll this morning, huh?” Rudy teased. Linda steadied herself. “That was a rush!” she said. Fortunately nothing had broken, on her or the Squeeze Inn.

  Linda tightened a rack on the front of the trailer, which held the pair of twenty-pound propane tanks that fueled her fridge, the stovetop burners, and a small furnace. Finally Rudy helped her hitch the Squeeze Inn to the Jeep. She started the ignition and pulled ahead, tentatively at first. Waving good-bye, she rolled out through the gate. Just like the old advertising brochure promised, the trailer “followed like a kitten.”

  WHEN LINDA DIDN’T REAPPEAR after the first set of turns in the San Bernardino Mountains, my brain shuffled through a deck of possible disasters. Maybe her engine stalled. Maybe she got a flat tire—bad news without a spare—or worse, a blowout. The apprehensions grew darker. What if the Squeeze Inn had disconnected and gone barreling back down the hill? What if a wide turn had sent the Jeep over the roadside, into the canyon, like a remake of that climactic scene from Thelma & Louise?

  I was starting the van to go back and look for her when the phone rang. “I’ll be right there,” Linda said. I felt a surge of relief when she appeared at the turnout, but it was short-lived. Linda pulled up and pointed out something odd on her trailer: The propane rack was empty. Both tanks had flown off in the tight turns. One of them, still tethered to its hose, had bounced along after the Squeeze Inn, taking a four-inch bite out of its fiberglass shell. The other had detached completely and rolled across the highway like a combustible tumbleweed. The oil truck, still following close behind, swerved to avoid it and sped past Linda, who was lucky and had found a stretch of road with room to pull over. The runaway tank came to rest on the far side of the highway. Linda sized up her situation—perched on the outer edge of a blind curve, she was invisible to oncoming traffic—and resisted the urge to dart across and retrieve it. “That’s a $20 propane tank, and I am a priceless person!” she remembers thinking. She unscrewed the remaining tank from its hose and stashed it in the trailer.

  With that near-mishap averted, Linda continued uphill. She drove throug
h the communities of Arrowbear Lake and Running Springs, whose alpine slopes brought skiers and snowboarders during the winter but were now drawing mountain bikers and hikers. She passed the century-old dam at Big Bear Lake, a snow-fed reservoir, and traced its northern shore through bald eagle habitat. Next came Grout Bay and the tiny town of Fawnskin, given its current name by early twentieth century developers who didn’t think a place called “Grout” would attract vacationers. There the general store was stocked with everything a wilderness adventurer might need: fishing tackle, beer cozies, toboggans, tire chains, sleeping bags, sun umbrellas, and souvenir shotgun-shaped liquor bottles. (“Tequila shots,” the cashier explained.) The nearby town park was full of fiberglass monuments to men in uniform, including a baseball player, an Indian chief, a cowboy, a fireman, a fighter pilot, a pirate, and a highway patrolman. They looked like they might start singing “Y.M.C.A.” “All these statues!” Linda exclaimed during a later visit to Fawnskin. “Why aren’t there any women?” Then she noticed other sculptures: a pair of oxen hitched to a covered wagon. Those two were probably female, Linda suggested, since they had no discernible genitalia and were the only ones doing any work. From then on, whenever she passed the park, she’d call out to them: “Heeeeeyyy, girls!”

  On Rim of the World Drive, Linda cruised past a private estate whose incongruously tidy lawn was visible behind heavy locked gates and “No Trespassing” signs. She slowed the Jeep to a crawl as she turned onto Coxey Truck Trail. Here the asphalt gave way to a washboard dirt track flanked with yellow sprigs of western wallflower poking out between the boulders and manzanita shrubs covered in pink, urn-shaped blossoms. There were also remnants of the 2007 Butler II wildfire: charred tree trunks bristling up from the landscape like giant porcupine quills. That blaze had engulfed more than fourteen thousand acres of forest, including Hanna Flat, which was closed for repairs until 2009. As she neared the campground, Linda kept her speed down and focused on the rough road, dodging deep ruts in the hard-packed dirt. The Squeeze Inn bounced and clattered behind her.

  It was around 6 p.m., still light out, when she arrived at the campground entrance. At seven thousand feet above sea level, Hanna Flat was more than a mile higher than Mission Viejo, where her journey had started that morning. The air was colder and thinner. She spied a bulletin board and got out of the Jeep to read it. Notices warned visitors to beware of snakes, to extinguish their campfires (“EVERY SPARK DEAD-OUT”), and to avoid bringing in firewood with invasive stowaways: insects like the gold-spotted oak borer and nefarious pathogens with names like “pitch canker” and “sudden oak death.” A large map showed a road looping through eighty-eight numbered campsites that could each be rented for $26 a night. There was also a numberless tract, so close to the entrance that Linda could see it from where she stood. It had a few amenities: a paved parking pad, hookups for water and power, and a picnic area with a table and a campfire ring. Out front, near a rotting stump colonized by fire ants, a sign read “CAMP HOST.”

  Linda was home for the next four months.

  APART FROM THE START OF HER JOB, something else had Linda counting the days: A friend was coming to work with her. Silvianne Delmars, sixty, had never been a campground host before, but she was excited to give it a try. “With Linda May at my side, I could face an army!” she’d declared a few months earlier. Silvianne was living in a 1990 Ford E350 Econoline Super Club Wagon, which had been a transit van for the elderly and a work vehicle for convict labor crews before she bought it off Craigslist, complete with leaky head gaskets, bad brakes, cracking power steering hoses, worn-out tires, and a starter that made ominous grinding sounds. Sometimes sunlight raked the passenger side at an angle that revealed the edges of long painted-over letters that spelled “Holbrook Senior Citizens Assoc.”

  Two of Silvianne’s pals had suggested names for the vehicle: “the Queen Mary” and “Esmeralda.” Not wanting to pick one over the other, she named it the Queen María Esmeralda. She transformed the interior with jewel-tone scarves, embroidered pillows, Christmas lights, and an altar bearing a Virgin of Guadalupe votive candle and a statuette of Sekhmet, the lion-headed Egyptian goddess. Silvianne had set out in her van following a string of challenges: her car stolen, her wrist broken (no insurance), and a house in New Mexico that she couldn’t sell. “The first time you sleep in your car downtown, you feel like a horrible failure or a homeless person,” she explained. “But that’s the great thing about people: We make everything habit.”

  Silvianne had first encountered Linda a year and a half earlier, when they were both working as night-shift temps at the Amazon warehouse where Linda hurt her wrist. Silvianne was a tarot card reader—she’d also held jobs in corporate healthcare, waitressing, retail, acupuncture, and catering—and she came to see the chain of events that put her in her van as divine influence, the goddess setting her on a gypsy path. (On her blog, Silvianne Wanders, she also characterized the transition like this: “A not-quite-retirement-age baby boomer gives up her sticks ’n bricks former miner’s cabin, her three part-time jobs, and her attachment to any illusion of security this tattered remnant of the American Dream might still bring to her tortured soul. The goal: to hit the road for a life of nomadic adventure as the Tarot reader—Shamanic Astrologer—Cosmic Change Agent she was always meant to be.”)

  Silvianne in her van, the Queen María Esmeralda.

  Silvianne wrote a song she called her “vandweller anthem.” The first time she sang it for me, the Queen María Esmeralda was parked in a Burger King parking lot in Arizona and we’d been doing an interview inside while peeling the breading off chicken nuggets and feeding them to her green-eyed cat, Layla, who wouldn’t eat them any other way. Set to the tune of “King of the Road”—and refined several times since Silvianne began writing lyrics on a lonesome stretch of Highway 95 in Arizona—the latest version goes like this:

  Old beat-up high-top van,

  Like livin’ in a large tin can.

  No rent, no rules, no man,

  I ain’t tied to no plot of land.

  I’ve got cool forests for summer fun,

  Winterin’ in the desert sun.

  I’m an old gypsy soul with new goals,

  Queen of the Road!

  My friends think I’m insane,

  But for me their life is way too tame.

  If sometimes I sing the blues,

  Small price for the life I choose.

  I’ve found all space is hallowed ground,

  If we will but look around

  In our sacred search for the New Earth.

  Queens of the Road!

  I know every back road in five western states.

  If it’s a blue highway I don’t hesitate.

  I learn every strange history of each little town.

  I may get there slowly but I get around, in my . . .

  Gas-guzzling high-top Ford

  I’m sometimes scared, but never bored,

  Because I’ve finally cut the cord

  Unlike society’s consumer hordes.

  I’ve got a large feline to keep me sane,

  Lovely Layla is her name,

  Not really wild, but not too tame

  Queens of the Road!

  When Linda arrived at Hanna Flat, Silvianne was still two hours south in the Queen María Esmeralda, parked outside a friend’s condo in Escondido, enjoying the access to laundry and hot baths. (She was “driveway surfing” in vandweller slang.) Down to $40, she was waiting on the mail for a credit card, the first one she’d had in ten years.

  Linda’s first few days at the campground were quiet. There were coyote sightings and rumors of a mountain lion. A couple inches of snow fell and she ran a space heater to warm the Squeeze Inn. She bought a replacement propane tank. She decorated her fridge with a magnet that said “Live each day as if Aunt Bee were watching,” featuring a photo of the housekeeper from The Andy Griffith Show, along with an ode to nomadic living called “A Full Set of Stuff” by a writer named Randy Vinin
g, who also referred to himself as the Mobile Kodger. It began, “I travel full time with a full set of stuff/Not less than I need or more than enough.” She read books. A vandweller friend had recommended Woodswoman: Living Alone in the Adirondack Wilderness and Linda devoured it, marveling at the independence and frugality of the author, ecologist Anne LaBastille, who was inspired by Walden and built her own cabin using just $600 worth of logs. Next she started Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, an entrepreneurial self-help tome that she scoured for advice on building a fulfilling future. And she snuggled with Coco, who nestled into her side on their shared mattress and sometimes scooted up to hyperactively lick her face. “Oh kisses, kisses!” she told the dog. “You’re going to wear out that tongue! You’re going to need a tongue retread, and guess who’s gonna pay for that?”

  On the Sunday Silvianne was due to arrive, Linda went to freshen up at the nearest showers, which were five miles away at Serrano Campground on the shore of Big Bear Lake in chilly cinderblock stalls. To conserve water, the fixtures only turned on for quick intervals and taking a shower meant pushing the same chrome button over and over again. Back in the parking lot, Linda brushed her long locks in the sun, did a shampoo-commercial flip. “Is my hair shiny yet?” she asked.

  Snow blankets the Squeeze Inn at Hanna Flat Campground.

  Silvianne showed up that afternoon wearing a mustard yellow Frida Kahlo T-shirt, a flowing patchwork skirt, pink leggings, and suede moccasins. She hugged Linda and went to peek inside the Squeeze Inn. “It looked bigger in the pictures!” she said. Silvianne is tall and slender and wore her wavy, graying brown hair in bangs, with a few tendrils escaping a banana clip in the back. She had to duck to enter the trailer. Linda told her how much she liked living there. The only comforts she missed from her old RV were the shower and the toilet. She’d replaced the latter with a bucket, and so far, that seemed to be working out okay.