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  Camp host orientation began Monday at 8:30 a.m. and lasted two days at Big Bear Discovery Center, an education facility run by the U.S. Forest Service. To reward trainees who participated in the class, California Land Management supervisors tossed packaged Moon Pies at them. Mostly the workers looked forward to the free lunches: hot dogs on one day, chicken from El Pollo Loco on the other. Apart from food, each of the camp hosts received a maroon three-ring binder with the 350-page California Land Management operations manual, along with a detailed verbal rundown of the work to come. They were encouraged to scour their campgrounds for “microlitter”—bits of cellophane wrappers, foil scraps, cigarette butts, and other flotsam—and to keep individual campsites free of “trip hazards,” such as the grapefruit-sized cones that fell from the forest’s towering Jeffery pines. They heard cautionary tales, too, stories about mistakes they should avoid. One time a hapless worker forgot to check for live embers while shoveling ashes out of campfire rings and ended up setting his golf cart on fire. Don’t be that guy. Another time a campground host broke a rib when she boosted herself up onto a dumpster to reconnect a bear-proofing chain. “That was me!” Linda exclaimed, to the chagrin of her bosses, who told the story without realizing its victim was present. (That accident had taken place the previous summer when Linda was working in Mammoth Lakes, California. For a while the injury made everything hurt: breathing, sweeping, driving bumpy roads in the golf cart, bending over, even laughing along with her campers. Friends and family insisted she see a doctor. He confirmed the rib was broken and urged her to avoid lifting anything heavier than ten pounds while it healed.)

  At 8 a.m. on Wednesday, Linda and Silvianne set out for their first day of work in matching uniforms: brown pants and khaki windbreakers with a mountaintop logo stitched to the left breast. In those colors, they bore a passing resemblance to federal forest rangers; they’d been told this was a useful bit of camouflage when dealing with unruly campers. Silvianne had already been up for hours to follow her morning regimen—taking detoxifying herbs before meditating and eating a breakfast that, like the rest of her diet, contained no sugar, meat, dairy, or refined grains—a healing routine she hoped would help cure a basal cell carcinoma below her right eye. Their golf cart was loaded with tools: two rakes, two brooms, a spade, a metal can for ashes, and plastic buckets full of cleaning supplies. It was also stocked with leaflets advertising pricey wilderness tours via parasail, helicopter, Segway, zip line, off-road four-by-four, and a paddlewheel boat named Miss Liberty. Silvianne, who had just learned to drive the golf cart, was excited to take the wheel. Linda rode shotgun. The morning was cold but bright, with sun filtering through the pines. Ravens croaked in the branches and mountain chickadees sang a three-note melody that matched “Three Blind Mice.” At the base of the trees, bright red snow plants—asparagus-shaped stalks that bloom in late spring and use a fungus to pull nutrients from the conifers’ roots—were starting to poke through the pine needle carpet. Western fence lizards skittered across patches of gravel. Ground squirrels dove into their burrows as the golf cart approached.

  You could tell Linda had done this kind of work before by her collection of tricks. When she disinfected the outhouses, she draped a paper towel over the rolls of toilet tissue to avoid misting them with chemicals. She talked about getting some Pam cooking spray—or WD-40, but Pam was cheaper—because coating the walls of the toilet chutes with it makes waste less likely to stick. After emptying a litter basket, she demonstrated a quick way to knot a new plastic liner so it wouldn’t slide down past the lip. When raking dirt around the picnic tables, she added a wrist flick at the end of each stroke. “That way they can’t tell where you stopped,” she explained. “It looks more natural.”

  At one messy campsite—an unbundled sleeping bag and a roll of toilet paper were strewn in the dirt, along with empty Cup o’ Noodles packages—a cooking fire had been left burning. Linda and Silvianne took turns dousing it with jugs of water, coughing as the smoke and steam billowed up and the embers hissed. They stirred the soupy, boiling ashes with a shovel to make sure no hidden sparks would reignite. Later that day, the campers—a crew of guys in their twenties—returned from a hike to their waterlogged fire pit. They were cold. Despite a snowy forecast, one wore short sleeves and hadn’t packed a jacket, while another hiked in the only shoes he brought: bedroom slippers. Linda found them there, trying haplessly to restart the fire. “When you leave, you’re supposed to be able to put your hand in your campfire,” she said patiently. “It’s lucky we found it and not the forest rangers.” The rangers would have fined them. The guys apologized profusely. “Sorry ma’am!” they said. “Sorry about that.”

  Twice a week, Linda and Silvianne were responsible for all of Hanna Flat. On the other three days, they split the territory with another camp host who was familiar with the area. (That employee liked to tell a story from the year before, when she was working in the same forest and a flasher wrapped in the American flag—and nothing else—ran around exposing himself until police arrived to take him away.) Most of their time on the job went to cleaning Hanna Flat’s eighteen toilets and eighty-eight campsites. Apart from janitorial tasks, they checked in new campers, collected fees, set out site reservation tags, gave hiking advice, settled petty disputes, shoveled out fire pits, and did paperwork. Campers came to them to purchase the company’s $8-a-bundle firewood, which was locked in a cage on the camp host’s site. Often they walked away without purchasing a thing, taking Linda and Silvianne’s advice to scavenge wood from the forest that followed “the three Ds”: already dead, down, and detached. Sometimes at the end of rounds, Linda was winded and had to take a nap.

  Living next to a sign that says “CAMP HOST” isn’t easy. It means you’re captive to campers’ needs at all times. So when were the off hours? If a camp host was around and there was work to be done, the host was expected to do it. When two trucks of campers showed up at Hanna Flat one night at 11:30, they went straight to the Queen María Esmeralda and woke up Silvianne to have her check them in. Camp hosts were also expected to enforce nighttime “quiet hours” and handle noise complaints. Linda tried to pre-empt problems in a friendly way. When a group of folks who looked like they might be partiers first arrived, she’d tell them, “We want you to have fun, but after ten we want you to have fun really quietly.” When she saw a campsite strewn with beer bottles, instead of demanding that the campers clean it up, she’d make a helpful offer: “I could bring you down some big trash bags.”

  Linda and Silvianne had been hired to work full forty-hour weeks, but there were no guarantees. Half a month into the job, their supervisor abruptly told them that campsite reservations were down and the company needed to cut costs. As result, Linda and Silvianne would work a three-quarter schedule for the next two weeks. That sent Linda’s weekly pay under $290. (It was even lower for Silvianne, who hadn’t received the returning-worker raises that Linda had.)

  Linda and Silvianne didn’t complain about the erratic and sometimes boundary-less nature of this low-wage labor, but other workampers have. A common frustration voiced by camp hosts is that they’re expected to do more work than what fits within the fixed number of hours for which they can bill. One worker in his sixties, who was employed with California Land Management for the first time in 2016, emailed me from his post to talk about it. “Camp hosting is a trip,” he wrote. “Lots of mixed messages from ‘management.’ I’m at a thirty-hour site, but some weeks clocked forty-five plus. I pushed back about that and they have reduced what they were asking.” His managers did not, however, pay for the extra hours he’d already worked.

  That echoed something a pair of campground hosts in their mid-sixties, Greg and Cathy Villalobos, told a legal news site in 2014. They said that, while working as campground hosts for California Land Management and another concessionaire, Thousand Trails, they were expected to work more hours than they were allowed to put on their time cards. “I mostly want to get this story told to help other seniors
and stop this practice. It is pretty outrageous, especially because it comes down to the federal government who contracts these companies,” Greg Villalobos told the reporter.

  Another workamper, employed with California Land Management in 2015, gave the company a one-star review on Yelp, claiming she and her husband were often on the job for twelve hours or longer in a given day but weren’t allowed to file for more than eight. “Them doing this to elderly couples that needed the income was wrong and needs to be investigated!” she wrote.

  The U.S. Forest Service, which hires private concessionaires to manage public campgrounds, has also gotten complaints. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the agency’s Pacific Southwest Regional Office so I could read some of them. When the documents finally arrived, censors had blacked out employees’ names, ages, and contact information. In one letter, a fourteen-year California Land Management employee said coworkers weren’t being provided with water while working in the heat. “Even field workers are provided with shade and cold water to drink. Why is this not being done for your own employees?” the letter read. It recounted the travails of one camp host who was assigned to work alone at two campgrounds—Upper and Lower Coffee Camp in the Sierra Nevada foothills—on 109-degree days and “was transported by ambulance twice already for heat exhaustion.” The same employee, it added, “has worked many overtime hours [but] he has been told by the site manager not to write overtime on his time card. I’m sure other employees are being treated the same way as well.”

  In another complaint, a former camp host for California Land Management in the Sequoia National Forest wrote:

  I received very harsh migrant labor-type treatment . . . I was employed at $8.50 an hour for “forty hours” but routinely had to work fifty to sixty hours plus for the same forty-hour pay with no overtime or even straight time. Therefore CLM is not paying a minimum wage. By “work” I do not mean standby time but rather a full eight hours intensive raking, debris removal, clean up in Hume, Princess and Stony Creek Campgrounds, as well as Ten-Mile and Landslide, cleaning numerous pit toilets several times a day, fire pits, blowing roads etc. And then doing registrations until almost 9 p.m. My first week they worked me six days straight, eleven to twelve hours a day . . . After some discussion where I finally voiced some of these concerns [my supervisor] called me a “punk” to “shut your punk trap” and “take your punk ass back to Oregon.”

  I wrote to California Land Management about these grievances and heard back from Eric Mart, the company’s president. “I can assure you that our policies (copies of which are available to all employees), our training, and our standard operating procedures are all contrary to what these employees are claiming,” he replied. California Land Management investigated at least three of these complaints, he continued, and found them without merit. (One worker, though, did get reimbursed on a claim of unpaid hours.) The last of the cases—which referred to a manager shortchanging an employee and calling him a “punk”—triggered a separate investigation by the U.S. Forest Service, he added.

  Federal officials said otherwise. When I approached the U.S. Forest Service about these employees’ specific letters, I was told the agency does not look into such grievances directly. Instead it forwards the letters to any concessionaire that the workers are complaining about—which in this case would be California Land Management. That is the agency’s official policy, even though the U.S. Forest Service is responsible for issuing and renewing the concessionaires’ operating permits and, ultimately, for how public lands are managed.

  “The Forest Service does not have the authority to act on complaints of labor law violations, discrimination or any other type of complaints against private employers, including conducting any investigation,” explained press officer John C. Heil III in an email.

  During a follow-up phone call, I asked him if he really wanted that to be the agency’s full response. “It seems odd that these are your contractors, ostensibly under your control, but you appear to have no control over them,” I added.

  Heil explained that he had researched the Forest Service’s protocol, which was to forward all letters, and had nothing further to say.

  AS LINDA GOT ACCUSTOMED to Hanna Flat, I observed her first two-and-a-half weeks there. We sat together for hours in her trailer at night. She doled out her life story in installments. The oldest of three siblings, Linda had adored her parents despite their shortcomings. Her father drank heavily, working on and off as a machinist in the San Diego shipyards, while her mother fought chronic depression. They bounced between apartments, moving seven times in a single year, and at one point left California for a stint staying with family in the Black Hills of South Dakota. On the drive east, Linda squeezed into a truck with her parents and two brothers, plus all their belongings and a dachshund named Peter Jones Perry. Linda’s mother had to get some teeth pulled around the same time. “My father couldn’t afford to put dentures in her mouth,” she recalled. “So here we are in this big flatbed with all the furniture in the back, my mother with no teeth, three kids, some damn dog.”

  Over time Linda’s father developed an increasingly violent temper. Sometimes at the dinner table he whacked her youngest brother over the head with a serving spoon. He beat Linda’s mother, threw her down the stairs, and “tossed her around like a ragdoll.” During one of the fights, Linda, who was about seven, hid in the back corner of the top bunk in her bedroom. There she made herself a promise: This is never going to happen to me.

  Meanwhile Linda struggled with dyslexia, though no one knew it. When her report cards arrived, they said things like “Linda is college potential but does not apply herself.” Linda felt like a duck. To observers on shore, she appeared to be drifting along without any effort, but underwater her feet were churning furiously.

  She dropped out of high school but eventually got her GED, along with a certificate in construction technology and an associate’s degree. She held jobs that included trucker, cocktail waitress, general contractor, flooring-store owner, insurance executive, building inspector, IRS phone representative, caregiver at a traumatic brain injury facility, dog-feeder and kennel-cleaner in a government program for seniors—she still bears the scar from a Shih Tzu bite—and de-featherer of ducks and quail at a hunting lodge. And Linda raised two daughters, mostly on her own.

  I listened intently, absorbing as much as I could. I hoped it would help me understand some nagging questions: How does a hardworking sixty-four-year-old woman end up without a house or a permanent place to stay, relying on unpredictable low-wage work to survive? Living in mile-high alpine wilderness, with intermittent snow and maybe mountain lions, in a tiny trailer, scrubbing toilets at the mercy of employers who, on a whim, could cut her hours or even fire her? What did the future look like for someone like that?

  Even though I’d had no epiphanies, the time came for me to go home. I left behind my extra groceries: some cold cuts, tomatoes, eggs, bacon, cheese, kale, soup, carrots, and tortillas. Most of it went to Linda because of Silvianne’s restricted diet.

  “This will help a lot,” Linda said matter-of-factly. “I’m down to $10 until payday.”

  As I packed to leave, Linda and Silvianne built a campfire. For kindling, they used a stack of old paperwork—copies of the “DAR,” or daily arrival report, showing which campsites had been reserved. The reports were supposed to get burned or shredded. If the smoke from the DARs could carry a message heavenward, I asked, what would it be? “We went camping! We had a great time! The bathrooms were immaculate!” Linda replied.

  The sun was getting low and the cold crept in. Already bundled up in hoodies and their fleece-lined work jackets, Linda and Silvianne shivered and talked about getting dinner started. There would be no more campers to check in tonight. They’d already set out a sign that read “CAMPGROUND FULL” at the entrance.

  So I said my good-byes and started up the camper van. The camp hosts stood and waved. “Don’t let the campers burn the forest down!” I sho
uted. Linda shook her head and hollered back.

  “Then I’d be out of a job!”

  * When I first embarked on that story, little did I know it would grow into a larger project, with three years of reporting and hundreds of interviews.

  † In a few weeks Linda would turn sixty-five, bringing her already meager benefit down to $424 after the deduction of Medicare premiums.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The End

  ON THANKSGIVING DAY OF 2010—before her life as a nomad began—Linda May sat alone in the trailer where she was living in New River, Arizona. At sixty, the silver-haired grandmother lacked electricity and running water because she couldn’t afford the utility bill. She couldn’t find work. Her unemployment benefits had run out. Her older daughter’s family, with whom she had lived for many years while holding a series of low-wage jobs, had recently downsized to a smaller apartment. With three bedrooms for six people, there wasn’t enough space to move back in with them. She was trapped in a dark trailer with nowhere to go.

  “I’m going to drink all the booze. I’m going to turn on the propane. I’m going to pass out and that’ll be it,” she told herself. “And if I wake up, I’m going to light a cigarette and blow us all to hell.”

  Her two small dogs, Coco and Doodle, were staring at her. (Doodle, a toy poodle, would later die before Linda moved into the Squeeze Inn.) She hesitated—could she really envision blowing them up as well? That wasn’t an option. So instead she accepted an invitation to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving dinner.

  But that moment—the instant when she saw her resolve flicker—wasn’t something she could easily forget. Linda considers herself “a happy, joyous person.” She had never seriously entertained the idea of giving up on it all. “I was just so down that I couldn’t see a way out,” she later recalled. Something had to change.